Nimbus Communications has launched a broadband initiative - CricketNirvana, and two other sites - Filmnirvana.com and Showtime Video. The site will begin streaming rich media content today, to co-incide with the start of the India-South Africa cricket series. I spoke to Sumit Luthra, Business Head (New Media) for Nimbus Communications about a number of issues - why they aren’t launching mobile initiatives, budget allocation to new media, cross-media plans, the home video business, and an online streaming site.

What’s the strategy behind Cricketnirvana?
Nimbus has certain rights which are inherent to the company till 2010. It also includes rights to certain archival content which BCCI has of domestic and international markets. The strategy involved opening up new fronts. TV is an appointment-viewing instrument, and the idea was to give cricket in a format when people want it. Other was to take cricket and associate it content like news. We want to focus on Indian and subsequently Asian Cricket.
How will you be different from Cricinfo and Cricketnext? Isn’t what you’re doing a subset of their coverage?
They wont have the richmedia content that we do, and we will be focusing primarily on Indian Cricket. Even Cricinfo gets around 35 percent out of India. We’ll be streaming matches live. We’ll be giving the first match live free as sampling, and post that it will be subscription based.
How much will you be charging for subscription?
The base subscription starts at Rs. 25 for 1 day of viewing, for all live, all interactive, all highlights. Then is scales up as we go along - there’s a match pass, a series pass.
That’s fairly low..wouldn’t this be a cost center for you?
On the kind of numbers and projections - 25 rupees would be the entry price, but we don’t have a direct cost of rights. We’ve paid a block price across television and internet, and so there’s no incremental cost there. Cost of sales is predominantly my cost of infrastructure and streaming cost. Obviously the margin wouldn’t be too high at this cost, but I don’t think India as paid subscribers would be able to handle extremely premium pricing, if I were to price it higher. My break-even numbers, if we were to spread it across the pricing, at roughly 10,000 subscribers I should be breaking even.
Are you looking at differential pricing across markets?
There are two blocks - India and non-India. Within non-India, we’re not looking at non-India markets. As we mature through the series, more data points will come across.
Are you targeting primarily an International market? The site wasn’t loading in the US…
We’re targeting an international market, but there are certain regions where we have assigned the rights to licensees, for example - US, UK, Canada and Australia…upto 72 hours of the event getting over.
Do you think demand for rich media content will help you get ahead of dominant players like Cricinfo?
I believe so. The Internet has predominantly been the electronic version of magazines. People have been expected to read and consume. It’s time for people to star consuming moving content.

What’s the Nirvana Fantasy Cricket League?
It’s a pretty simple concept that’s done across most sports content, giving people an option of choosing a team, seeing how it performs at the end of a match.
What are your cross-media plans?
All the Neo sports based interactive sports will tie-up to the website. Dial-C-for-cricket is 5 days a week program, and every Wednesday’s show will be based on the users of the site. It will be a two way stream between the Internet and TV. It’s the same with the quiz shows that we’re launching.
Do you have any plans for the mobile?
No plans for mobile as of now. I was of the firm opinion that we open one front at a time. So with series we’re focusing on the Internet. The mobile market is something where the commercialization of content is not very clearly laid out. Mobile operators are looking at a revenue sharing model, while we’re in a cash and carry business. Operators are not used to giving out minimum guarantees. Cricket as a sport does not lend itself to small screen viewing, the kind of handsets that we have. The connectivity and the bandwidth issues for delivery of rich media content becomes a bottleneck. With specialized cricket related content, I don’t see a very clear commercialization plan in front of me right now.
There’s also Filmnirvana.com and how is it different from BigFlicks.com and Rajshri.com?
Filmnirvana - the idea was on the same lines - Nimbus has certain rights for Films. Most of the filmed entertainment sites focus on the big-ticfket projects. We believe there’s a market for the 95 percent of content, which doesn’t get the right kind of visibility. Idea is to aggregate the balance of content. We are planning user generated content, microsites, online reality shows. It’s not going to be a film magazine. It’ll be about the fan, not talking to the fan. We’lll have unconventional, user generated short form content, which is not conventional cinema.
What about Showtime.co.in Showtime Video?
Nimbus is just launching an ancillary business called Showtime Video, where we will be renting out DVD and VCDs.
What kind of a budget has been allocated to the New Media segment…
There are two ways to look at it - this is a greenfield project and enough resources have been allocated to seed the business over the next 3-4 years. Is there a no-regret or cut-off price? No. We have an open ended budget which we will finetune as we go along. We need to have the product live to see which of our assumptions are right. We’re definitely here to seed the business in the long term.